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Lysfanga : The Time Shift Warrior

2021-2023

Lysfanga: The Time Shift Warrior is a tactical Hack & Slash game where you must come back in time and cooperate with your past selves to defeat crowds of enemies. This game was created by a student team at ISART Digital and won the school’s Jury Price, and then the French Pégase’s Student Game of the Year Award. I had the chance to join the team at the beginning of the pre-production of a larger version of the student game. This game, now named Lysfanga: The Time Shift Warrior was a work for almost 2 years of a committed and passionate team.

In the first year, I worked as an intern on many features such as Interaction Zones, Shops, Enemies, etc. As my work was satisfying, I got recruited as a Gameplay Programmer and started working on the bosses of the game. This was a great responsibility, and I enjoyed it a lot. With the first iterations of bosses, we observed that the main mechanism of the game was causing a problem. If the player can come back in time, its remnants must perform the same action as before, and impact the fight the same way as the player did previously. However, if a boss moves to the current iteration of the player, it might dodge the previous remnants’ attacks. This is what we used to call « Desynchronization » in our game. Due to possible desynchronization, we decided to remove movement on all of our bosses. They are in fixed places, and follow specific actions in time, in contrast to basic enemies which can be considered AI, using pathfinding and behavior trees.

In the first year, I worked as an intern on many features such as Interaction Zones, Shops, Enemies, etc. As my work was satisfying, I got recruited as a Gameplay Programmer and started working on the bosses of the game. This was a great responsibility, and I enjoyed it a lot. With the first iterations of bosses, we observed that the main mechanism of the game was causing a problem. If the player can come back in time, its remnants must perform the same action as before, and impact the fight the same way as the player did previously. However, if a boss moves to the current iteration of the player, it might dodge the previous remnants’ attacks. This is what we used to call « Desynchronization » in our game. Due to possible desynchronization, we decided to remove movement on all of our bosses. They are in fixed places, and follow specific actions in time, in contrast to basic enemies which can be considered AI, using pathfinding and behavior trees.

In the first year, I worked as an intern on many features such as Interaction Zones, Shops, Enemies, etc. As my work was satisfying, I got recruited as a Gameplay Programmer and started working on the bosses of the game. This was a great responsibility, and I enjoyed it a lot. With the first iterations of bosses, we observed that the main mechanism of the game was causing a problem. If the player can come back in time, its remnants must perform the same action as before, and impact the fight the same way as the player did previously. However, if a boss moves to the current iteration of the player, it might dodge the previous remnants’ attacks. This is what we used to call « Desynchronization » in our game. Due to possible desynchronization, we decided to remove movement on all of our bosses. They are in fixed places, and follow specific actions in time, in contrast to basic enemies which can be considered AI, using pathfinding and behavior trees.

The Alpha, one of the bosses of the game.

At this point, I decided to rework the entire boss’ sub-systems. I created many scripts, to allow us to create multiple timelines for each boss, and to assign to them any boss pattern, if possible. This way, a boss can select randomly the actions it will do, without getting out of control for the designers. It forces the player to adapt and modify his actions during the fight, without creating frustration due to the boss’ movements & desynchronization.

Until the end of the project, I worked on the 4 different bosses, whether the core gameplay side, or the art integration, including VFX, animations, and sound.

Engine : Unity
Language : C#
Platform : PC, Nintendo Switch

Over 200 people worked on this project, I cannot credit them all. Here is the link to the steam shop page.

Lysfanga: The Time Shift Warrior © 2024 Sand Door Studio. Published by Quantic Dream S.A.S. « Lysfanga : The Time Shift Warrior » is a trademark of Sand Door Studio and Fabloo Games. Quantic Dream and Quantic Dream logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Quantic Dream S.A.S. All rights reserved.